university or spending several long weekends or a summer
session in physical residence should count — something
DeMers says the licensing boards never intended.

When these students are told they’re not eligible for licensure
because they lack a year of residency, says DeMers, some get
mad at the licensing boards. “And when they go back to the
school, the school says, ‘We didn’t guarantee licensure; we
designed it with an eye toward licensure,’” he says. “It’s a parsing
of words.” The result is students having to seek licensure not
where they want to live or practice, but simply where they can
get a license.

Now some of those states with ambiguous definitionsare rewriting their rules to clarify exactly what they mean byresidency. To DeMers, that trend — coupled with CoA’s decision— suggests the field is drawing a line. “It’s not embracing thismodel of training, so it’s not a question of some states beingearly adopters and others will come along later,” he says. “It’sactually going the other direction.”According to Klonoff, CoA is open to revisiting the issue iftechnology ever advanced to the point that research showedit could meet all of CoA’s concerns about enculturation andquality control. “CoA uses implementing regulations to informthe public how they think,” she says. “It means it’s not set instone and that at a later point it may be the case that CoA maymake a different decision.”

Online components

Of course, neither ASPPB nor APA is against the use of online
components as a supplement to traditional learning.

“Online opportunities for learning can enrich programs,”says Cynthia D. Belar, PhD, executive director of APA’sEducation Directorate. “Some online work can be very rich andcomplex in terms of promoting learning.”That belief is supported by the Department of Education’smeta-analysis, which found that students whose programscombined both online and face-to-face elements had betterlearning outcomes than those in purely online or purely face-to-face programs. Most effective were blended programs in whichonline instruction was collaborative or instructor-directedrather than those in which students worked independently.Again, the report emphasizes that online education’s advantagesmay stem from differences in content, pedagogy and time spentlearning rather than the medium per se.

Alliant International University is one school that combines
face-to-face and online instruction in its clinical psychology
training.

“The online methodology is most frequently used for
foundational courses — courses like biological bases of
behavior, perception and cognition — where you’re teaching a
knowledge base as opposed to a clinical skill,” says psychologist
Russ Newman, PhD, JD, provost and vice president for
academic affairs. “You wouldn’t try to teach someone how to do
a psychological assessment online, nor would you teach them

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how to do psychotherapy online, or just online.”For those courses where being online is appropriate, saysNewman, the methodology brings some advantages not possiblein traditional courses. In one class, for example, students fromAlliant’s different campuses came together virtually and wereable to share very different cultural perspectives.

For universities, adds Newman, online courses aren’t the
cost-saving panacea many believe they are. (Finley adds that
online courses aren’t time-savers for faculty, either, explaining
that online courses take her twice as much time as traditional
courses to prepare the first time she teaches them and one-and-a-half times longer thereafter.)

“If you just have a bunch of canned online courses that
you’re delivering, it probably is much less expensive,” says
Newman. But, he says, to do the kind of online education
Alliant provides means developing special online courses,
training faculty to deliver them and then maintaining courses
over time.

For Newman, that investment is worth it — and a sign of
progress.

“In the early versions of distance learning, you took a
PowerPoint, put it online and let people go through it,” he says.
“Online education has come a long way.” n